“Come no closer,” God said. “Take off your sandals, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” [Exodus 3:5]
Moses and the Burning Bush by Domenico Feti (1613).
When he left the Egyptian palace in a hurry, after killing an officer for ill-treating an Israeli, Moses was an impetuous forty year-old. For the next forty years, life would be the mundane daily routine of watching sheep grazing on the scant grass of the rocky terrain on Mount Horeb [another name for Sinai]. But, today, the voice of Him who created the heavens and the earth called his name, not once, but twice, and not from beyond the clouds, but from the middle of a bush, burning but not burnt up. From today, his life would forever be changed and all of history would see a turning point (Exodus 3:1-4:17).
Moses, on hearing the double-call – “Moses, Moses” – instinctively knew that something important was going to happen. With the benefit of Scriptures, we know that something divinely significant was about to occur (Gen. 22:1; 1 Sam. 3:10; Lk. 10:41). The high drama that unfolded lends itself to endless reflection. Let’s take three points and muse a bit.
Today, Jebel Musa on the Sinai Peninsula is identified as Mount Sinai where God appeared to Moses.
1. Daily bores and holy ground
For most people, our daily life consists of boring routines. So used to the rhythm of our life, we have lost the capacity to see the extraordinary in the ordinary, until we open our eyes and ears to a deeper dimension of reality.
Moses, a fugitive from Pharaoh’s death warrant, had settled down to a simple nomad’s life out in the wild. His past was nobody’s concern, so he said little about it. He had no contact either with his Jewish family members or his adopted Egyptian family. Now, with a wife and an extended family, he had settled down to a life of domestic tranquility and, at the ripe old age of eighty, had come to expect nothing other than an uneventful life with children, in-laws and sheep. Yes, he had left some unfinished business – God’s people, to be exact – behind in Egypt. But his conscience, numbed by the passing years, could leave him alone now.
God, however, had other plans. In the slow, mysterious work of a timeless God, nothing in Moses’ life had been wasted. Moses, the one who took a life in Egypt, would now return to that country as the one sent there to liberate lives. God only needed to convince Moses of that! And God began with a simple but profound fact.
God told Moses that right where he stood was holy ground. One day, while pasturing sheep, doing what he did everyday for the last forty years, Moses saw a bush burning but not burnt up. Fascinated by what he saw, he went over for a closer look. God stopped him short: “Moses, Moses.” And he answered, “Here am I” (Ex. 3:4). If God summoned us today to a mission, would we be able to respond, “Here am I”, or would we be asking for time to attend to other priorities to avoid that call?
Once God calls us to do something, however, events tend to move fast. In the story, a very important point for spirituality came up at once as God said, “Come no nearer; take off your sandals, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” Right at the mundane place of his daily work, Moses encountered God for the first time in his life. That day, God occupied the forefront of his consciousness. An ordinary day, doing the same old thing, became a day pregnant with life-changing experience.
Scripture has a message for us all: God dwells in our mundane daily routines even more so than in the one-hour-a-week incense of the Sunday liturgy, and if we are not open to the “burning bushes” right where we stand, right where we live the rest of the week, we probably may not encounter God at all in the whole of our life – a span of seventy years at most, eighty if blessed with good health (Ps. 90)! But if we plunge into life with an eye to meaning and purpose, there God appears, and we hear God calling each of us to an abiding sense of mission.
While he was in the corridors of power during his youth, Moses was impatient to set his people free. Down in his ordinary, simple, routine life of a shepherd, he had lost all sense of mission. Through Moses, God opens our eyes to what an inauthentic life may look like.
We are to see that real spirituality does not run away from life struggles, but faces every difficult challenge squarely. We are to live all the dimensions of human life – the ordinary and the extraordinary, the good and the bad, the easy and the tough – with awareness and strength, with depth and quality.
Often we give in to the idea that we have to be exceptionally “blessed” and “gifted” to do God’s work. Like Moses, we suffer from inferiority complexes because we are “old”, financially weak and, outside of the corridors of power, unable to wield influence. Stopping Moses right where he was, God wanted to teach him that his holiness depended on finding holiness where he stood. We are always on our way to some place else to find God when right where we each are standing, is the place where God offers us a holy encounter. God wants us to realize that He has given each person a patch of grass. We are to live out our Christian discipleship as fully as we can, by grazing on our given patch, not on someone else’s. We are also to know that until the last moment of our life, God has a task for us. At whatever age, if we approach life positively, the God of surprises will reveal Himself to us in marvelous graciousness.
There is just one condition: we need to take off our sandals. “Sandals” here is a rich metaphor for all kinds of stumbling-blocks we need to remove if we are to enter the holy space of God’s presence. “Take off your sandals” is a caveat to approach God with reverence and awe. Asking Moses to take off his “sandals”, God also meant to help him to learn and fit into God’s plans, instead of seeking to fit God into his plans. In many of our prayers, we are forever telling God what to do and when to do it. Through Moses at Horeb and Jesus at Gethsemane, we learn to submit to God’s will and ask of God what it is that He wants us to do and then settle down to listen to what He says to us. Until we can set aside our own presumptions, it is not possible for us to do God’s mission; we would only be doing our own thing.
When we hear all of that as a resounding call, our peace, like Moses’, may be broken, but it may very well be the beginning of a fascinating new day of authentic, meaningful living. Perhaps then, St Paul’s spirit may begin to make sense, as “Christ now lives in me” (Gal. 2:20).
2. Self-motivators and mere instruments
Through Moses, God begins teaching us afresh.
First, God tells us that we tend to rush things. Self-motivation is good, but we may miss the truth that God executes His plans in His time. Enthusiasm propels us, but we are quickly dismayed when things do not go the way we expect. If only we would learn to wait for God! Scripture reminds us that in what we do, we may be running ahead of God’s plans. Might we not learn from Moses that our life thus far, like Moses’ eighty years, was not a waste but a preparation?
Second, God in the fullness of time says to us that He will send us. It is only when we hear that, can we truly understand that we are not the initiators of God’s work, but are merely His agents through whom God works His plans. Then we will know that all the good things that we do are parts of God’s mission, not ours. Then, too, we may learn that God saves, but God saves through us. God wants our faith in discharging what He assigns us to do, and leaving the results to Him.
Third, God has a plan for every hour of our lives and He waits to reveal that plan when our hearts are loving and obedient and we are able to hear. Moses was doing his own thing for so long, impetuous in his youth and laid back in old age. For eighty years, he could not hear the voice of God. But God had a plan and He waited. The same is true for us. We do our own thing all the time. We do not let the liberating power of God work in us because it is very difficult in our busy life to listen to Him. We hide behind familiar things that we do everyday, including regular religious rituals. We do not hear that gentle call: “Stop. Free yourself, become authentic, and listen to Me!” He who spoke in oracles through the ancient prophets is the “I AM” who waits for our seeking hearts to be still enough from our businesses and busyness – our plotting and our activities – to listen. For only when we quiet down, can we hear God speaking to us. Only then, can we respond, “Here am I.”
3. Our excuses and God’s suffering
Our response to God is resistance. We need to see how insolent we actually are to God.
Notice, again, how Moses in his impetuous youth would attempt the emancipation of his people by the blows of his hand without a second thought of the consequences. And yet, in old age when God seriously sent him to lead an exodus, he recoiled from the very idea of it. This is entirely true of us all. In youth, we knew all about life and its ways and were feverishly impatient. When the real call comes, we are faint-hearted and weak-kneed. Like Moses, we have many excuses and we insult God no end.
In the four objections which Moses raised, we see our own excuses. And in dealing with Moses’ human weaknesses, God speaks directly to each of us.
First, we question God’s ability to know what He is doing in sending us! “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?” Perhaps that was not so much a voice of humility as reluctance, that turns into a questioning of God’s sense of judgment: “Are You sure You know what You are doing?” Perhaps, too, Moses acted on his feelings of inadequacy. Struggling with indecisions when we feel called to undertake certain missions for God, do we not often object to that call on account of the difficulties that lie ahead? Whenever that happens, God’s reply is confidence-boosting: “I shall be with you.”
Like Moses, our human “I” is a mere agency; the “I AM” of Yahweh will confront Pharaoh and lead the people. Just as God is telling us that He is with us in all those “impossible” missions in our lives, He is also affirming the need for leaders to be humble.
In his youth, Moses was full of himself, trusting in his own strength; now in senior age, when a combination of factors had allowed an inferiority complex to set in, he was to learn about God’s power and influence in his life. Perhaps, too, St Paul, even though in a converse situation of danger of pride bewitching his ministry, had Moses’ story at the back of his mind when he wrote about his own condition:
- Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me; but he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ … for when I am weak, then I am strong. [2 Cor. 12:8-10]
It was only when Moses and Paul were poor and powerless that the all powerful God was able to use them as agents to liberate others.
Second, even after receiving reassurance that God is with us, we object and ask, “But what shall I tell them who you are?” Indeed, how can we convince ourselves, let alone others, that what we are doing is indeed according to God’s will? When God answered, Moses had a good glimpse of the “I AM WHO AM”. As “the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”, He is the covenantal God of the past. As the God who sees the affliction of His people in Egypt, hears their appeal to be set free, shows concern about their suffering, and resolves to bring the suffering people up out of the land of oppression to a land of flowing milk and honey, He is the compassionate God of the present. And as the God who actually takes action to send His agent, “Come, I will send you”, He is the faithful God of the Future. Perhaps most importantly, according to Midrashic tradition, the fire in the thorn-bush was for Moses an image of a God suffering with His people in Egypt.
Third, even after knowing the name of God, we fear that the people would not believe us or listen to what we say. They may very well say, “The Lord did not appear to you” (Ex. 4:1). Skeptics will demand proof. If we raise this objection, God will graciously give us a glimpse of how our “burning bush” experience may be transported to wherever we are to carry out God’s command. As for Moses, he was given the power to perform three miracles to convince the Israelites that he was on a divine mission: first, turning the shepherd’s staff into a serpent and again into a staff; second, causing his own hand to become leprous and then whole again; and third, turning the water of the Nile into blood (Ex. 4:2-9).
All this, to be sure, was not to put an end to all doubts, for God knows that even signs will not convince skeptics. It was to teach Moses and us that God can do great things by us, if only we are willing to be wielded by His hand – like clay in the hands of a potter.
And still, we have one more excuse. Like Moses, we complain that we are slow of speech and tongue (Ex. 4:10) – in a word, lacking in eloquence. But recall that, schooled as he was in Egyptian royal court, Moses “was powerful in speech and action” (Acts 7:22b). So this is nothing but a lame excuse, against which the suffering God, with His patient grace, assures us that He will help us speak and tell us what to say (Ex. 4:11-12). God’s response to us will always be an invitation to trust Him because He is the Creator.
Do we believe God now? Hardly! If we are anything like Moses, we would more likely be testing God’s patience still. We would be asking God to send someone else if possible! (Ex. 4:13). When all is said and done, this is the kind of stuff that angers God. It is like, grudgingly, we say we will go, but make no mistake, dear God, we go because we are compelled. Almost in disgust, God will send someone to accompany us, to be our spokesman. In the later chapters of Exodus, Scriptures point us to the reality that God’s concession in giving us “an Aaron” may prove to be as much a burden as a blessing!
This is what we pathetic creatures do to God. He calls us to some mission and we, sensing the sacrifices and the obligations associated with the mission, hold back in perpetual hesitation, as if we are heading for our early grave! We rehearse every possible excuse in our minds in an attempt to evade the Divine will, and we listen to people – supposedly of good will, who have our interest in their hearts – who tell us to stop entertaining ideas that will cost us if we put them into action. There is a pathetic fickle-mindedness in us Christians who forget that a basic lesson in all of Christ’s teaching is that if we take the Gospel seriously, it is going to cost us!
But if we do summon enough courage to submit to the Divine will and see it through, Moses’ experience in the third and last stretch of his life reveals that God indeed promises that we will get nothing short of the ride of our life – with all its ups and downs, to be sure.
Copyright © Dr. Jeffrey & Angie Goh, February, 2013. All rights reserved.
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